A unique collaboration between two indigenous filmmakers and an anthropologist, Owners of the Water is a compelling documentary with groundbreaking ethnographic imagery. A central Brazilian Xavante, a Wayuu from Venezuela, and a US anthropologist explore an indigenous campaign to protect a river from devastating effects of uncontrolled Amazonian soy cultivation. Xavante and Wayuu are nationally and internationally prominent political actors and both face challenges over water.

Owners highlights a civic protest showing strategic use of culture to bring attention to deforestation and excessive use of agritoxins in unregulated soy cultivation. The film features a diversity of Xavante opinions and evidence that non-indigenous members of the local population both support and oppose indigenous demands. The film showcases indigenous efforts to build networks among different native peoples and across nations.

The film results from long collaboration between anthropologist Laura Graham and Xavante and more recent collaboration with Wayuu. The Association Xavante Wară, a Xavante organization that promotes indigenous knowledge and ways of living in the central Brazilian cerrado (a spiritually and materially integrated space that Xavante know as 'ro) and conservation of this unique environment, invited Graham to tell the story of its campaign to save the Rio das Mortes. David Hernández Palmar, a Wayuu (Iipuana clan) from Venezuela, accompanied Graham to meet the Xavante and learn about their struggles over water. After the trip the Xavante and Wayuu filmmakers and the anthropologist made this film based on the ethnographic footage of their intercultural encounters.

“…the scope of Owners of the Water goes well beyond the somewhat narrow focus of past documentaries, exposing the viewer to a diversity of facts, images and viewpoints. Owners of the Water deserves credit for tracing cutting edge indigenous issues in the Amazon.” — Jonathan C. Bergman, Indigenous Peoples Issues and Resources

“Owners of the Water will be of interest to professors teaching courses on the indigenous peoples of Latin America as well as on the anthropology of protest movements, applied anthropology, and ecological anthropology. Visual anthropologists will find that it is a useful model for incorporating the voices and the aesthetics of the people with whom we work, both in front of and behind the camera… This film could serve as an inspiration to indigenous communities across Brazil and the wider world to use digital technologies in the struggle to maintain the ecosystems on which they depend.” — Brian Brazeal, American Anthropologist, Vol. 114, No. 1